


for a sleepless night

by clairza



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: A little bit of pining, F/M, Force Bond, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 14:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13296936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clairza/pseuds/clairza
Summary: He was four when he told her he was too old to be sung to. She never did again.





	for a sleepless night

**Author's Note:**

> This is in response to a Tumblr prompt: _Kylo wakes in the middle of the night to hear Rey singing to herself in the Force Bond; bonus points if it was his mother or father._
> 
> This … is close? 

Kylo wakes up exactly two minutes before his wake-up call with the end of a dream drifting away like vapour. 

He knows better than to grasp at it. He's used to his dreams leaving him wracked with phantom pain or burning with rage but this, this prickling yearning for something _missing_ is a new development and he thinks it might be worse. 

An hour later, after he’s showered and eaten and read the morning update on the fleet status, he still can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong or out of place, and there’s a snatch of something at his periphery, a three or four note melody that keeps looping endlessly in his head. It chases him through the day, through meetings and in hallways and in a routine check of his shuttle; a few notes humming in and out, just  _not enough_ for it to turn into anything that he can grasp and make sense of. It’s driving him mad.

It’s well into night shift when he throws himself onto his mattress and his head has barely hit the pillow when there’s the still-strange popping feeling of the universe expanding and contracting; he blinks, rolls over, and sure enough, his room is now dissolving into another and Rey’s standing with her back to him in the dim glow of one lamp with filmy material stretched from one hand to the other. It takes him a second to work out that he’s caught her folding  _laundry_. It’s so ridiculously domestic that he smiles before he can help it. 

She doesn’t turn around but she knows he’s there - he can tell by the set of her shoulders - but they’ve gotten very used to this, and she barely pauses, rolling the strip into a neat ball, ticking the ends in with practiced fingers, picking up the next, stretching it out. The mundaneness of it is somehow comforting.

 _Hey,_ she says, after a while, through the bond, as if unwilling to break the silence.  _Long day?_  
  
Yeah. 

_Me too._

He exhales. He hasn’t seen her like this in a while; she’s in a loose tunic with bare feet and arms, and he props his head on his hand and watches her crossing backwards and forwards from her bunk to her locker, all softness and blurred lines. It’s easy to forget for a moment who they are, easy to forget about uprisings and fuel and supply lines and strategy; it’s dangerously easy to lose himself in cataloguing tiny things, like the way her calf muscles stretch when she reaches to hang her belt on a peg near the door, the way her hair shines in the light. The bruises on her ankle, the inside of her knee. The tiny flower next to her bunk in the smallest jar he’s ever seen. 

His headache has almost disappeared when he hears it again, that stupid melody and all the tension of the day comes roaring back and he’s about to throw something across the room when he realises where it’s coming from.

It’s  _Rey_. She’s half-singing, half-humming under her breath, low and unpractised but sweet; it’s more sound than words but the tune is clear and all the fragmented notes he’s been hearing all day coalesce into  _something, something that he knows,_ and Kylo pulls a pillow over his head so she won’t turn around and see his face.  

It’s the lullaby that his mother used to sing him to sleep, and if he concentrates hard enough, he can almost see her, smell of her perfume on her wrists, feel her hand brushing through his hair, just enough pressure to make him shut his eyes.

He was four when he told her he was too old to be sung to. She never did again.

It takes a moment for him to work out that something of what he’s feeling must be bleeding through the bond, because the room is now silent, and when he pulls the pillow off his face and sits up, she’s very carefully not looking at him, but she’s not doing anything else either.

“What was that?” he says finally; he’s aiming for nonchalant but he’s pretty sure he falls short because Rey flicks him a skeptical look and then goes back to folding one of her arm wraps.

“What was what?”

“What you were singing?”

She pauses, and he feels a sudden rush of self-consciousness trickle into the bond.

“It’s, um. It’s.” She stops dead, her throat working, and he could pry it out of her but they’ve been better at respecting boundaries lately and so he waits, waits as she runs a hand through her hair – it curls at her collarbones and he tries not to focus on that either,  _boundaries_  - and now Rey is looking a little panicked. “I don’t know?”

“How do you - not know?”

Her fingers are worrying the frayed edge of one wrap, a flush creeping up her neck, her eyes skittering to the corner of the room.

“I think I heard it in your head,” she says finally, all in a rush. “It was in your dream. Last night.”

Well.

He swallows, fights the unexpected sweep of spinning vertigo. There's a yawning chasm between who he is and who he once was, and he can feel every nauseating inch of it. 

_Kill it if you have to._

Rey’s face is red. “I’m sorry,” she offers quickly. “I didn’t even realise I was doing it, I’ll stop – “

“No.” His response is too fast to be casual. “I – it was - nice.”

They stare at each other until something in his face must reassure her.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

He hesitates, and then she smiles and looks down; the first real smile he’s seen on her in weeks, and he absolutely shouldn’t but he can’t help himself: “I – I can teach you the words?”

There’s a beat, a moment, where her eyes catch his and _hold_ and something in his chest compresses and then expands into gold.

“I’d like that,” Rey says out loud, but underneath, the bond between them keens:  _Ben._


End file.
